Universal Fleets for AIS and Weather
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I'd Love to see some consideration on the idea of two community-wide anonymous fleets to deliver a crowd-sourced weather overview and the ultimate directory for small boat AIS traffic.
Weather-Fleet
All participating member vessels on the fleet map could be shown as merely their vessel icon (no name) with a bubble displaying the local weather they are experiencing now. We could pan around this “weather-fleet” and view “real-time” weather from sailloggers that are currently in waters of interest. True Wind, Temp, Sea Temp. Pseudo weather-bug/station model.
AIS-Fleet
Even more interesting - is a unified display of the AIS traffic collected from all the saillogger AIS contributors with a search box to “find” vessels by name or MMSI. In other words, an “AIS-Fleet” that unifies all the pink AIS targets picked up by all the sailloggers. Over time, this will provide superior coverage and be more up-to-date than the sources that rely on random collection schemes to relay AIS data like Marinetraffic, etc. The vessels of interest to me often vanish from AIS for weeks or more because they boat far from shipping lanes and away from the safari tour boats, etc. But they voyage and anchor around other small boats and among them an increasing number of Sailloggers. Locating AIS vessels, friends or otherwise, in the off-grid areas is a value that Saillogger could fill. Bye-bye Marinetraffic.
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Thank you for the recommendation—these are great suggestions! I’d love to hear from other community members as well, so here are some initial thoughts:
We really appreciate contributions related to weather, since better weather data benefits everyone by improving planning and forecasts. That’s why we integrated Windy functionality into Saillogger and assumed ownership of the Windy Signal K plugin under Saillogger, which doesn’t require a Saillogger subscription.
As for the AIS fleet idea, Saillogger’s AIS fleet already covers more ground than some of the other options out there, especially if you’re interested in vessels scattered across remote cruising areas like Alaska, British Columbia, and the Caribbean. The challenge, however, is that displaying large amounts of AIS data on a map can be taxing on browsers, so some technical optimizations are needed to keep performance smooth. It’s definitely feasible—other platforms with numerous markers do it—but we want to ensure it remains efficient for users.
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If you are already sending AIS data to Saillogger via SignalK, why not set up a free "AIS station" with MarineTraffic to help them fill in some of their voids?
I really like the weather fleet idea and hoping to get my boat set up on the Windy plug-in later this week as I already have a Windy account.
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The current coverage is stunning! I can appreciate the amount of data involved which I assume could be downloaded in real time in small chunks specific to the localized area of interest? Perhaps have to zoom to a minimum level before data becomes visible. Perhaps a unified Fleet view where vessels which are broadcasting weather can be identified by a small flag (or color). With regard to AIS: more helpful to me than seeing clusters of targets would be searching for a specific boat name/mmsi by submitting that criteria to the server.
